


and they call me under

by OfThemyscira



Category: DCU (Comics), Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Wonderbat, j'onn is a Good Grandfather, wonderbat has a child and there is so much regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 18:01:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14407500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfThemyscira/pseuds/OfThemyscira
Summary: Things like "everyone she ever knows and loves dying around her while she never ages" didn't occur to Bruce and Diana when they petitioned the gods for their child.





	and they call me under

The first years in the wake of his death are hard. She can’t quite come to terms with an eternity without her father—she never will, she knows, but in those first years, she learns to pretend that she can.

Nightingale becomes Bat. The days blend together, usually. Aella loses track of which siblings are gone, which friends are gone. If she works more, it hurts less on the outside.

“You’re becoming more like him at his worst,” her mother comments. Absently, Aella wonders if Diana finds it comforting. She must miss him, too, after all.

 

After fifty years, the only people left who knew her father are her mother and J’onn. Someone finally killed Superman. Aella forgets who.

 

Their identities were scrapped long ago. After Bruce died, there was no reason to pretend that they didn’t age.

 

Aella finally stops drifting when her mother is killed, a century after age took her father. The rage feels nice, if only because it’s something.

“She was not invulnerable,” J’onn says. It is meant to be consoling. “To time, maybe—as you and I are—but we must all be granted rest eventually.”

Is that what it is? Rest? Aella wonders how long she must wait to join them.

 

She drifts again, after the pyre on Themyscira. She can’t find the will to grieve with Hippolyta. All of the other people Hippolyta cares about will live on with her forever into oblivion. Aella is an immortal born into a world of dying.

 

A hundred years becomes a thousand. The world changes slowly and superficially. She loses sight of things that mattered, once. Bat becomes Guardian. Bat lost its meaning a lifetime ago.

She wakes up when she forgets her purpose.

“I can’t remember their faces, J’onn.” She’s crying. Aella can’t remember the last time she felt any emotion strong enough to cry. “I can barely remember them at all—I don’t even why I’m _doing_ this!”

J’onn understands. He has not seen her in six hundred years. She has become reclusive, cold.

His mind is stronger than hers, so he is not fragmented. He does not want to tell her that she is.

He takes her to the manor. It is a shell. The only rooms not in disrepair are the ones she uses. The Lasso is there. She almost wonders how he remembers it exists. It is a foolish thought.

“Take it into your hands,” he says. “Think to what time has hidden from you.”

She does. The revelation slams into her—a thousand years of memory and feeling, and she doesn’t realize she’s screaming in pain until her throat is hoarse and her palms have red marks from where she gripped the rope.

Aella remembers it all: her mother’s laugh, the stern gaze of her father, Alfred’s care when neither were home. So many faces and names she’s pushed away to the farthest recesses of her mind. It was easier to forget—but there is no life in numbness.

She allows herself to live.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t written or posted fan fiction in eight years. This was not how I intended to return to the medium.
> 
> For those curious about her origins, I headcanon Diana as infertile. They petitioned the gods, performed a ritual (awkward sex on an altar) and Hera carved her from the granite of Mount Olympus.


End file.
